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FEATURES
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22.05.2025
The Real Truth About Kneecap Exposed
Double Down News exposes who is really trying to destroy Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap.
21.05.2025
Netanyahu To Lose $47 Billion Over IDF Operations?
The EU is reviewing its $47.25 billion trade agreement with Israel amid the Gaza crisis, with 17 EU members backing the move. The review focuses on possible human rights violations and the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel rejects the EU's stance, blaming Hamas for the conflict.
20.05.2025
UK Government Suspends Free Trade Talks With Israel Over Gaza War
The British government says it will suspend new free trade negotiations with Israel due to its military conduct in the war on Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent days under bombardment, a new ground offensive has been launched and starvation is widespread.
19.05.2025
Extreme Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi is a very powerful, very small, very customisable device, and we have seen it be used for so many things over the years because of this. Whether folks are slipping them into 3D-printed classic console cases or simply hiding them away as home file servers, we’ve covered many of the cool things the community has done with Raspberry Pi.
Which begs the question - how can you push the limits with a Raspberry Pi? Well, with 13 years of projects and Raspberry Pi models, you'll be surprised just how far/fast/high/deep Raspberry Pi has gone. We're taking Raspberry Pi to the extreme.
18.05.2025
Mahmoud Khalil: Letter To My Newborn Son
In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch. I feel suffocated by my rage and the cruelty of a system that deprived your mother and me of sharing this experience. Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments?
17.05.2025
This Is The Code The FBI Used To Wiretap The World
The FBI operation in which the agency intercepted messages from thousands of encrypted phones around the world was powered by cobbled together code. Motherboard has obtained that code and is now publishing sections of it that show how the FBI was able to create its honeypot. The code shows that the messages were secretly duplicated and sent to a "ghost" contact that was hidden from the users' contact lists. This ghost user, in a way, was the FBI and its law enforcement partners, reading over the shoulder of organized criminals as they talked to each other.
16.05.2025
Make Your Own Aircraft Tracking Antenna With RTL-SDR
Over on the Tech Minds YouTube channel Matt has posted a video tutorial that shows how to build a cheap quarter wave ground plane antenna tuned for 1090 MHz. This is the frequency of ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast), which is a signal broadcast by aircraft that can be used to track their GPS location.
The antenna is created from an SMA chassis mount socket, one copper wire for the receiving element, and four copper wires for the ground plane. They are soldered directly onto the socket. An LNA is added to improve reception.
15.05.2025
Fighter Jet Firms Dined Key Witness In Israel Arms Export Case
The UK government is being challenged in court this week over its decision to keep exporting fighter jet parts that can be used by Israel's fleet of F-35 warplanes.
Declassified has discovered that one of the key witnesses has accepted hospitality from arms firms directly involved in the F-35 supply chain.
Keith Bethell, a director of Defence Equipment and Support within the Ministry of Defence, was called on by the government to give written evidence about Britain's role in the F-35 programme.
14.05.2025
Grok Is Rambling About "White Genocide" In Completely Unrelated Tweets
Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, has gone absolutely bonkers and is flooding X-formerly-Twitter with bizarre posts about "white genocide" in response to completely unrelated tweets.
The issue was flagged online by Aric Toler, a visual investigative journalist for The New York Times, and first reported by Gizmodo.
Ask Grok abut anything, it seems - HBO Max's latest name change, messages from the new Pope Leo XIV, the MLB, and much more - and the bot will respond with multi-sentence missives about allegations of white genocide in South Africa and references to "Kill the Boer," an anti-Apartheid song decried by far-right groups in South Africa.
13.05.2025
Journalist Abubaker Abed: "If I Stayed, I Would've Died"
We speak with 22-year-old Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed in Ireland after he evacuated Gaza last month suffering from malnutrition and under threat for his reporting on Israel's genocide. Abed describes himself as an "accidental war correspondent" and hoped to become a sports journalist and commentator before the start of the war, but spent much of the last two years reporting on daily death and destruction. He says leaving Gaza was "a very agonizing decision" for him and that he feels tremendous guilt for now having access to food, water and medicine while so many Palestinians continue to suffer. "I can't really tell you that I'm safe here. I'm probably a physical survivor, but not an emotional survivor. The images that I took with me from Gaza are still haunting me," says Abed. "My whole family is still in Gaza, my friends, my colleagues. And all of them, I'm just thinking about them every single second all day."
12.05.2025
The Late Robert Anton Wilson On Donald Trump
"It's very hard to distinguish who's really stupid, who's full of shit, and who's fucking crazy." Which do you think Donald Trump is? Robert Anton Wilson shedding some light on genuine stupidity.
11.05.2025
Trump's Naked Imperialism & How the British Empire Never Died
Abby Martin talks to investigative journalist Matt Kennard and author of The Racket, about the machinations of US Empire under Trump, and how the British Empire never died but simply tethered itself to the United States.
10.05.2025
Israel 'Sending Soldiers To Commit War Crimes In Gaza'
The Israeli military's former chief of staff has accused his successor of "sending soldiers to commit war crimes" in Gaza and torn into Israel's government for "losing touch with Jewish morality".
In an interview with Israeli outlet Ynet on Thursday, Moshe Yaalon, who also served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's defence minister between 2013 and 2016, said Israel had abandoned the captives held by Hamas and was carrying out a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Gaza.
Yaalon attacked the current military chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, saying he was not stopping "clearly illegal orders" and was ordering "his soldiers to be war criminals".
"Call it ethnic cleansing, call it transfer, call it deportation - it's a war crime," Yaalon said, describing plans led by far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir to occupy the entire Gaza Strip and evacuate its Palestinian population.
09.05.2025
BBC Accused Of Censorship For Withholding Film On Gaza Medics
Prominent health workers have written to the BBC expressing "profound outrage" over its decision to delay the broadcast of a new film about doctors working in Gaza, which they say is "censorship by omission".
The documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire, was ready to broadcast in February but was pulled because of a scandal that erupted over another BBC documentary on children in Gaza, entitled How to Survive a Warzone.
The BBC launched a review into the film after the Israeli embassy in London and British ministers criticised it over revelations that its 13-year-old narrator Abdullah al-Yazuri's father is a technocrat in Gaza's Hamas-administered government.
Britain's public broadcaster has said it will broadcast Gaza: Medics Under Fire after the review into the earlier documentary has been concluded, although it is not clear when that will be.
08.05.2025
The AI Industry Has A Huge Problem
Artificial intelligence models have long struggled with hallucinations, a conveniently elegant term the industry uses to denote fabrications that large language models often serve up as fact.
And judging by the trajectory of the latest "reasoning" models, which the likes of Google and AI have designed to "think" through a problem before answering, the problem is getting worse - not better.
As the New York Times reports, as AI models become more powerful, they're also becoming more prone to hallucinating, not less. It's an inconvenient truth as users continue to flock to AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, using it for a growing array of tasks. By having chatbots spew out dubious claims, all those people risk embarrassing themselves or worse.
07.05.2025
Mozilla Launching "Thundermail" To Take On Gmail & Microsoft 365
Mozilla is turning its Thunderbird open source email client into a full communications platform with the launch of Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro.
The expansion of Mozilla's email services aims to compete with rival ecosystems like Gmail and Microsoft 365, which are more rich in features, except Mozilla's offering stands out for its open source values of privacy, freedom, transparency and user respect.
"Thunderbird loses users each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services," Ryan Sipes, Managing Director for Product Thunderbird confirmed as he expressed the 'why' behind Thunderbird’s expansion.
06.05.2025
50,000 Years Ago - A Lost History Of Human Consciousness
Here is an extract from one of the last trialogues between Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake. This three-way dialogue took place at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1998, two years before Terence's untimely death.
05.05.2025
Dread Zeppelin In Girdwood, Alaska (October 13th 2000)
Dread Zeppelin in their first Concert in Alaska. Produced by Jay Bell at the Daylodge at Alyeska Resort. This is the original live recording and raw footage.
04.05.2025
The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism Explained
In the age of surveillance capitalism human behavioral data has become an economic asset. According to Shoshana Zuboff's powerful book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism tech giants such as Facebook, and others all collect this data and use it for targeted advertising on its users and other situations that impact the future of society.
This documentary features impactful events in the development of the surveillance capitalism world, like the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony, and B.F. Skinner's theory of 'radical behaviorism'.
03.05.2025
The Worlds Of Philip K. Dick
In this documentary film, viewers learn about the life of Philip K. Dick including his early work as a pulp fiction novelist, his successful career with Hollywood, and his obsession with artificial intelligence. Friends and experts remember the man, his importance in the literary world, and the psychoses that drove his work. Hear excerpts of Dick talking about his own work.
02.05.2025
Scientists Identify A New State Of Consciousness In Lucid Dreaming
Researchers have discovered that lucid dreaming is not just a vivid sleep state - it's a unique form of consciousness. Unlike regular dreams, where people are unaware they're dreaming, lucid dreamers gain control, enabling them to fly, walk through walls, or face fears.
01.05.2025
Why I Wrote An Expert Report Against The UK's Classification Of Hamas
Predictably, the British establishment is vilifying lawyers trying to end the proscription of Hamas' political as well as armed wing. The lawyers have good arguments. So why is no one listening?
This is the first time I have had to begin an opinion column with both a journalistic disclosure and a legal disclaimer. But hey ho, these are dystopian times we live in.
30.04.2025
I Was Forced To Burn My Books To Survive In Gaza
I was raised to love books. I never thought I would have to feed them to a fire so I could have a meagre meal.
When we were children, my siblings and I regularly spent our pocket money on new books. Our mother had instilled in us a passionate love for books. Reading wasn't just a hobby; it was a way of living.
I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a home library. It was a tall and wide piece of furniture with lots of shelves that they had placed in the living room. I was just five years old, but I recognised the sacredness of its corner from the very first moment.
My father was determined to fill the shelves with a variety of books - on philosophy, religion, politics, languages, science, literature, etc. He wanted to have a wealth of books that could compete with the local library.
My parents would often take us to the bookshop attached to the Samir Mansour Library, one of Gaza's most iconic bookshops. We would be allowed to pick up to seven books each.
Our schools nurtured this love for reading as well, organising visits to book fairs, reading clubs, and discussion panels.
Our home library became our friend, our solace in both war and peace, and our lifeline on those dark, haunting nights lit only by bombs. Gathered around fire pits, we would discuss the works of Ghassan Kanafani and recite the poems of Mahmoud Darwish we had memorised from books in our library.
29.04.2025
Eight Reasons Why You Should Learn The Linux Command Line
The Linux command line is a powerful tool used to control and interact with the operating system. It is a text-based interface that allows users to enter commands and execute programs, as well as view and edit files. The command line provides access to a wide range of Linux features and commands, including system utilities and applications, network configuration, file manipulation, and more.
It is often used by system administrators, developers, and power users who need to perform complex tasks quickly and efficiently. What follows are eight main reasons why to learn Linux command line.
28.04.2025
Louis Theroux: 'The Settlers' Full Documentary
Louis Theroux spends time with the growing community of Israeli religious-nationalist settlers. Their settlements are illegal under international law, and they have been protected by the army, the police and the Israeli government.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, there has been an acceleration in the establishment of settlements, with settlers pursuing a campaign of violence against local Palestinian communities.
What was once a fringe movement has now won support at the highest levels of government, with their supporters holding key positions in the cabinet and able to influence not only the role the military plays but also the future of this conflict.
Louis Theroux embeds himself in the West Bank, meeting prominent settlers - including the ‘godmother’ of the movement, Daniella Weiss - and travelling throughout the territory to understand the consequences of their activity. Louis also meets Palestinians whose lives have been impacted by settlers moving into their communities. As the world focuses on Gaza, where at least 50,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed by Israeli forces since 7 October, Louis discovers that the settlers are already making plans to move into that territory, too.
Note: You need a BBC iPlayer account to watch this documentary, however, if you don't have one there are various magnet links to the torrent available here.
27.04.2025
Louis Theroux On His New BBC Documentary 'The Settlers'
Late last year, I spent three weeks travelling up and down the occupied West Bank - the region on the Eastern edge of Israel, which for nearly 60 years has been under Israeli military occupation. I was there documenting the world of the Israeli ultra-nationalists who have settled there, illegally under international law. My aim was to observe them up close, to try to understand their mind-set and their actions, and to get a sense of the impact of their presence on the lives of the millions of Palestinians who live in the region.
I'd made a documentary in the West Bank once before, in 2010. At that time, I was struck by the way in which a group of people were able to pursue an openly expansionist ethnonationalist vision while enjoying the benefits of a separate and privileged legal regime to those around them and being protected by the Israeli army.
That programme, titled Ultra Zionists, went out on the BBC in 2011. I went on to other stories. But late in 2023, in the wake of the deadly attacks on October 7 and the ensuing devastating war, I began reading articles in the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere suggesting that with the world's attention on Gaza, the settler community had cranked up its activities. There were reports that settlers, issued with thousands of assault weapons by the government, were running rampant, harassing and intimidating Palestinians, torching their shops and homes.
26.04.2025
In The Age Of AI, We Must Protect Human Creativity As A Natural Resource
Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.
Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.
25.04.2025
Conscious Electrons? The Problem with Panpsychism
I feel increasingly concerned about what I believe to be a mounting and extremely dangerous cultural threat looming on the horizon: panpsychism, the notion that all matter has consciousness, as opposed to being in consciousness.
At a historical nexus when new data and more critical thinking are finally rendering materialism logically and empirically inviable, panpsychism comes in as a tortuous but seductive bandaid.
It threatens to extend the delusion of a universe outside consciousness for yet another century. In this essay, I’d like to try and raise the alarm about it.
24.04.2025
Comedy At A Crossroads: Why The World Needs Bill Hicks More Than Ever
We lost a comedic prophet 31 years ago: Bill Hicks, who, with wit and rage, preached about the need for us to evolve. We didn't listen.
Hicks raged about politics, religion, conspicuous consumption, the military-industrial complex, prisons, cigarettes, the true nature of freedom, the mind-altering power of drugs, and all the things he thought were ruining American society or, worse, had the potential to make America a better place yet were banned by either law or a dogmatic, hypocritical code of morality. Often clad entirely in black, often smoking a cigarette, Hicks haunted the stage like the Ghost of Christmas Future, bellowing with all his might for people to change - now - before it was too late.
23.04.2025
Why Hamas Will Not Surrender
Call Gaza what you will: killing fields, an endless loop of blood, pain and death, the world's largest concentration camp. Or, as the population of Israel appears to be intent on doing, you can ignore it altogether.
The Ashkenazi Jews of Tel Aviv live in a western bubble, sipping their morning cappuccinos and fretting about their yoga teachers just one hour's drive away from the most appalling scenes the world has witnessed since Srebrenica, or Rwanda.
But there is one thing none of them seem to understand: Hamas won't surrender.
To think that its leaders in Gaza will take the money and run, as Fatah once did, is to reveal, after 18 months of total warfare and two months of starvation, how little Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands his enemy.
22.04.2025
The Quantum Suicide Experiment
Quantum Suicide is a thought experiment devised in the 1980s. The experiment implies that if the 'many worlds' theory of quantum mechanics is true, then conscious beings are immortal.
A physicist sits in a chair with a gun pointed at his head. The gun is attached to a machine that measure the spin of a quantum particle. Every time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the particle is measured. If the particle spins clockwise, the gun fires, killing the physicist. If the particle spins anti-clockwise, the gun won't fire - there'll only be a click.
The physicist keeps running the experiment, but all he ever hears is a click - the gun never goes off. Because each time the trigger is pulled, the universe splits, creating two universes - one where the physicist dies and one where he lives. From the living physicist's point of view, the gun just keeps clicking. But in all the other universes, there’s a dead body.
21.04.2025
The Greatest Book On Magick Ever?
17 years in the making, it's here! The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, in which Alan Moore and the late Steve Moore (no relation) lay bare their personal and profound take on the art and philosophies of magic! Danny's first impressions and a review. Was it worth the wait?
20.04.2025
Digital Sovereignty In A Time Of Rising Fascism
Paris Marx (of 'Tech Won't Save Us' podcast) is doing a solo episode this week to bring together some important issues that have been on his mind lately. This is a recording of a talk Paris gave in Auckland, New Zealand on how Silicon Valley's alliance with Donald Trump forces us to reassess the politics of the internet and challenge our collective dependence on US tech as it embraces the project of American empire.
19.04.2025
ITV Documentary Lays Bare The Fanaticism Of The Israeli Settler Movement
An Israeli settler polishes his gun. "The Palestinian savages around here, they have no mercy, no law, nothing," he says coolly. "Just blood and blood, like you see in the movies."
The settler, introduced to television viewers as Yair, has a beard and a ponytail, and speaks fluent English.
He is one of the most prominent figures featured in ITV's brilliant new documentary, Our Land.
Made by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Jordan Bryon and produced by Hardcash Productions, it was filmed across eight months last year in the occupied West Bank.
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